# VST++: Efficient and Stronger Visual Saliency Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11725 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11725/

## Key facts

- Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 113 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Holistically-Nested Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06375/) (2015)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [Res2Net: A New Multi-scale Backbone Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01169/) (2019)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [Learning Deconvolution Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04366/) (2015)
- [MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation with Mask Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00759/) (2020)
- [Focal Self-attention for Local-Global Interactions in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00641/) (2021)
- [EGNet:Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08297/) (2019)
- [Scaling Local Self-Attention for Parameter Efficient Visual Backbones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12731/) (2021)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (2019)
- [Multi-scale Interactive Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09062/) (2020)
- [K-Net: Towards Unified Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14855/) (2021)
- [The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2807/) (2014)
- [Visual Saliency Based on Multiscale Deep Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08663/) (2015)
- [Visual Saliency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12099/) (2021)
- [Salient Object Detection in the Deep Learning Era: An In-Depth Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09146/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [VSCode: General Visual Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection with 2D Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15011/) (2023)
- [RUN: Reversible Unfolding Network for Concealed Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18783/) (2025)
- [ATRNet-STAR: A Large Dataset and Benchmark Towards Remote Sensing Object Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13354/) (2025)
- [Reversible Unfolding Network for Concealed Visual Perception with Generative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15027/) (2025)
- [Controllable-LPMoE: Adapting to Challenging Object Segmentation via Dynamic Local Priors from Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21114/) (2025)
- [DifferSeg: Towards Diverse Multimodal Binary Segmentation via Differential Perception and Frequency Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08906/) (2026)
- [CONDA: Condensed Deep Association Learning for Co-Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01021/) (2024)
- [HVPNet: A Bio-Inspired Network for General Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31496/) (2026)
- [CoLA: Conditional Dropout and Language-driven Robust Dual-modal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06780/) (2024)
- [CoFiNet: Unveiling Camouflaged Objects with Multi-Scale Finesse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02217/) (2024)
- [Deep Fourier-embedded Network for RGB and Thermal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18409/) (2024)
- [LEAF-Mamba: Local Emphatic and Adaptive Fusion State Space Model for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18683/) (2025)
- [Small but Mighty: Dynamic Wavelet Expert-Guided Fine-Tuning of Large-Scale Models for Optical Remote Sensing Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09108/) (2026)
- [FCL-COD: Weakly Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection with Frequency-aware and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22969/) (2026)
- [From RGB Generation to Dense Field Readout: Pixel-Space Dense Prediction with Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06553/) (2026)
- [Is It Time for the Renaissance of Salient Object Detection in the Era of MLLMs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29222/) (2026)
- [SSNet: Saliency Prior and State Space Model-based Network for Salient Object Detection in RGB-D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02270/) (2025)
- [LSP-ST: Ladder Shape-Biased Side-Tuning for Robust Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14481/) (2025)
- [Towards Size-invariant Salient Object Detection: A Generic Evaluation and Optimization Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15573/) (2025)
- [DualGazeNet: A Biologically Inspired Dual-Gaze Query Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18865/) (2025)
- [DGSSM: Diffusion guided state-space models for multimodal salient object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17585/) (2026)
- [Learning Spatially Adaptive Structural Coordination for Underwater Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15535/) (2026)
- [U2Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20282/) (2026)
- [Liquid Fusion of Heterogeneous Representations Towards General Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26849/) (2026)
- [FSDBN: Foreground-Aware EEG-Visual Alignment via Dynamic Brain Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18344/) (2026)
- [VCP-DCN: Beyond Visual Concealed Property via Depth Collaborative Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27843/) (2026)
- [When Depth Hurts: Reliability-Aware Geometry Distillation for Depth-Free RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03378/) (2026)
- [SphereSOD: Geometry-Structure Coupled Learning for 360 Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07571/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While previous CNN-based models have exhibited promising results for salient object detection (SOD), their ability to explore global long-range dependencies is restricted. Our previous work, the Visual Saliency Transformer (VST), addressed this constraint from a transformer-based sequence-to-sequence perspective, to unify RGB and RGB-D SOD. In VST, we developed a multi-task transformer decoder that concurrently predicts saliency and boundary outcomes in a pure transformer architecture. Moreover, we introduced a novel token upsampling method called reverse T2T for predicting a high-resolution saliency map effortlessly within transformer-based structures. Building upon the VST model, we further propose an efficient and stronger VST version in this work, i.e. VST++. To mitigate the computational costs of the VST model, we propose a Select-Integrate Attention (SIA) module, partitioning foreground into fine-grained segments and aggregating background information into a single coarse-grained token. To incorporate 3D depth information with low cost, we design a novel depth position encoding method tailored for depth maps. Furthermore, we introduce a token-supervised prediction loss to provide straightforward guidance for the task-related tokens. We evaluate our VST++ model across various transformer-based backbones on RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T SOD benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing methods while achieving a 25% reduction in computational costs without significant performance compromise. The demonstrated strong ability for generalization, enhanced performance, and heightened efficiency of our VST++ model highlight its potential.